The Fall of 2010: Forms of Rebellious Discontent

There are many ways to define class in modern western societies but it would be hard to say that at this time resistance to current government policies was based primarily on class in the traditional sense. In an article in Sunday’s New York Times called “Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?”, Frank Rich detailed the role they played in the midterm election and concluded that both parties “go AWOL as America is looted.” One of the reasons, he wrote, was the parties’ dependence on their campaign financing.

In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, David Frum, in a piece about the “Post-Tea-Party Nation,” discussed American populism and wrote that it has almost always concentrated its anger against the educated rather than the wealthy. (So has Rob Ford in Toronto.) However, in the days when unions were strong and strikes were often violent, conflicts were often battles in a clearly definable class war. Class interests clashed. Nobody argued then that union members were prepared to give in because in a Horatio Alger society they all hoped to become millionaires eventually.

Today, class interests also clash but the clashes take different forms. One hopes that many Ph.D. theses are being written right now attempting to define these interests and describing the ways clashes between them are being resolved – or not resolved.

Ideological battles are also clashes of interests. In Germany these days a highly dramatic conflict is being fought out in Gorleben in Lower Saxony about atomic waste storage and the future of atomic energy.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote on November 8:

“The transport of highly radioactive waste from the French nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in La Hague back to Germany has provoked the largest protest to date in the region surrounding the interim storage facility in Gorleben [Lower Saxony]. Several thousand people blocked the transport of Castor containers over the weekend.

“That’s the merit of the Gorleben resistance, which has now grown into a popular uprising spearheaded by housewives, pastors, teachers and farmers. And it would be a fiasco if this peaceful protest were discredited by violent protest. Such violence would allow the pigheaded nuclear policy to cast itself as the protector of law and order and to divert attention from the newly awakened mass criticism.”